Highlarious: Doug Benson @ The Boulder Theater

Doug Benson is one funny dude. You’ll have to take my word for it since, admittedly, I was too busy laughing during his show Tuesday night at the Boulder Theater to take solid notes to prove this fact. I tried, I really did, but the result was purple scribble resembling the phrase “crow dog,” the word “Jedi,” and something about cocks. (I really don’t think Benson actually talked about any of these things.) Clearly, my awesome scribin’ skills had nothing to do with the combination of the delicious, legal (*ahem*) “candy” bar and couple of glasses of wine I imbibed. I blame the lack of light in the theatre for my horrid penmanship. Right.

Benson’s set was heavy on the pot jokes, the schtick for which he’s best known for since the success of his 2007 film Super High Me. True, he’s very much a one-trick (read: stoned) pony, but that pony is still ambling on – sometimes confused, but mostly quite hilariously. See, potheads are easy to make fun of, and Benson is one of the biggest out there. His self-deprecating humor is instantly relatable, whether you partake in the Mary Jane or not. Yet, this being Colorado, the audience was heavily comprised of the High Times crowd, which worked quite to Benson’s advantage. He bantered with the audience, he laughed, he got off track, cracked himself up and no one cared. It was fun – much like hanging out with a buddy who tells absurd, priceless stories of his stoner adventures.

Opener Graham Elwood pummeled the audience with a manic whirlwind of jokes that got the show off to a stupendous start. Elwood seems to be wizard at language, slinging ridiculous phrases such as “organic unicorn whispers” and “buffet of bad decisions,” poking fun at both Boulder hippies and the midwestern U.S. with wild abandon.

Fans of Benson’s podcast Doug Loves Movies will appreciate the inclusion of two rounds of The Leonard Maltin Game, which pitted audience members against Elliot in a warped movie trivia contest that featured extremely random clues from a Leonard Maltin film review. Weird enough? Apparently not: a girl with a dinosaur hand puppet won the contest. Those crazy stoners…

Do tell…who’s your favorite comic?

Laura Keeney admits she originally became a professional writer because she was too cheap broke in college to pay for concert tickets. She’s obsessed with The Clash, blogs about music and other things, and writes for 303’s print edition.